About

Web References

Angie Wang, Principal

Angie Wang is a designer and educator who specializes in typography and typographic systems. Her studio, Design is Play, is a creative collaboration with Mark Fox.

Her work for March Pantry, Anson Mills, One Catering, and others has won numerous awards from the Type Directors Club, Communication Arts, Graph… Read More

Angie Wang is a designer and educator who specializes in typography and typographic systems. Her studio, Design is Play, is a creative collaboration with Mark Fox.

Her work for March Pantry, Anson Mills, One Catering, and others has won numerous awards from the Type Directors Club, Communication Arts, Graphis, AIGA, and Print magazine. In 2013, Design is Play was one of forty-four design firms interviewed for Steven Heller and Lita Talarico’s book “Design Firms Open for Business” (Allworth Press). More recently, Angie is quoted in “Design School Wisdom,” an anthology of tips from veterans in the industry (Chronicle Books).

Her work is also featured in “New Modernist Type” (Thames & Hudson); “Typography Essentials: 100 Design Principles for Working with Type” (Rockport); and “Typography Sketchbooks” (Princeton Architectural Press.)

In 2014, Angie served as one of five jurors for Communication Arts’ Design Annual, an international competition of the best design created over the last year.

Angie is a Senior Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco where she has been teaching in the Graphic Design Program since 2005. She has taught “Typography 3: The Book,” created the curriculum for the foundational course “Typography 1: Form,” and co-taught the Summer study abroad class “Amsterdam: Dutch Utopia” with Mark Fox. She graduated magna cum laude from UC Berkeley, and with distinction from the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC). She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Read Less

Mark Fox, Principal

Mark Fox designs trademarks, icon systems, and custom typography. His work with Angie Wang at Design is Play has been featured in books and honored by the AIGA, Communication Arts, Graphis, Print, and the Type Directors Club. Prior to his working with Angie, he designed under the nom de guerre BlackDog for more th… Read More

Mark Fox designs trademarks, icon systems, and custom typography. His work with Angie Wang at Design is Play has been featured in books and honored by the AIGA, Communication Arts, Graphis, Print, and the Type Directors Club. Prior to his working with Angie, he designed under the nom de guerre BlackDog for more than twenty years.

Known for creating arresting images with unusual concision, Fox has been described by Aaron Betsky, former Curator of Architecture and Design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as “a master at the specialized task of designing logos and symbols.” Betsky states further, “His designs have the impact of early twentieth-century propaganda, the aura of medieval myth, and the thought-provoking quality of a work of critical art.” Writing in Graphis, Ken Coupland notes Fox’s “talent for compressing the maximum amount of message into the minimum amount of acreage.” Regarding Fox’s winning entry in the 1993 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Beaux Arts Ball competition, juror Michael Manwaring proclaimed, “A short, sharp blast in a roomful of frippery.”

He has designed trademarks and iconography for a range of companies, among them Autodesk, Bianchi USA, California College of the Arts (CCA), Credo Mobile, Elektra Records, Eveready Battery Co., Major League Soccer, Nike, Oracle, PowerBar, Random House, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, TV Land (Nickelodeon), University of California Press, Warner Bros. Records, and Wired.

His work has been recognized nationally and internationally in such publications as Affiche (The Netherlands), B.A.T. (France), Blueprint (England), Communication Arts (United States), Critique (United States), Graphis (Switzerland), and Novum (Germany). His posters are included in the Prints and Photographs Division of the United States Library of Congress, the AIGA Design Archives at the Denver Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A one-man show of his political posters—“BlackDogma: Selections from the Work of Mark Fox in the Permanent Collection of Architecture + Design”—was exhibited at SFMOMA in 1999.

Fox has written articles for Communication Arts, Critique, and 3X3, and he authored the introduction to “The New American Logo,” published by Madison Square Press in 1994. An analysis of corporate trademark design, “Logos=God,” was featured in Communication Arts in 1999. He contributes book reviews to the site Designers and Books; “Ray Bradbury, Jaron Lanier, and ‘The Digital Flattening of Expression’” was posted in 2014.

He was President of the San Francisco chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 1995–1996, and served on the board of the Architecture + Design Forum of SFMOMA from 1998–2000. In 1995 Fox chaired the Design Lecture Series: “5ive Iconoclasts” featured Tibor Kalman, Vaughan Oliver, the Guerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, and Diller + Scofidio. In 2004 Fox was designated a Fellow of the San Francisco AIGA for personal and professional contributions to the San Francisco design community.

Fox is a Professor of Graphic Design at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco where he has taught since 1993. He served as Chair of Graphic Design at CCA on two occasions, from 2003 to 2007, and most recently from 2013 to 2014.

He earned a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1985, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Read Less